Mr. Quill is working on his preliminary sketches. He is experimenting, hoping to discover what colored patterns he can devise to make the story of our farmscape — and our sheepscape — easy to decipher. It sounds to me, from my position on the floor, as if he’s doing women’s work. His tools are cutlery and grinding blocks, and pestle dishes hardly larger than a shell. I half expect to smell the spice of cake. Nutmeg, at least. But all I get above the rot of veal are the cloying odors of his binding gum and lye. He is clearly content in my company, speaking freely now, not whispering. It doesn’t matter if he’s overheard by any of the Jordan men. He’s only talking processes, informing me, but also reminding himself, of each step in his recipes for color. He uses words I’ve rarely heard before — like lapis lazuli and smalt. They are somehow related to the emerging blues that are already in evidence on his fingertips — and across his cheeks and in his tapered beard. I am supposed to see the difference — although the light is low in here — between the florey and the litmus and the indigo, which he displays for me on little parchment tags. He is as snug and personal with his kitchen colors as I have learned to be with clouds, let’s say, or even with the sky’s own wash. I have my blues: this blue betokens harvest days (it will not rain), and that one promises a cracking frost; another — higher, darker and more ponderous — reveals itself only silently and briefly when the sun has already withdrawn into his bedchamber but the windows of his heavens are not yet quite closed; this is the blue that says we’re free to stretch and finish work and rest.

So our afternoon progresses cozily, drawn on by the prospect of our owlish rendezvous tonight. There is a touch of winter in the room, not in its chill but in its busyness — and that is comforting. What I will miss the most, now that Cecily is gone, now that I myself am tempted to depart, are those still and icy, cloud-weighted times in the dead season, when, if I were fool enough to step outside my cottage into the cold and moonless dark, all I could expect to see would be the ducking of my neighbors’ candle flames and all that I could expect to hear, other than the cracking of the frost beneath my feet, would be the industry of far-from-summer tools. This is for us the mending time and the fixing season: boys carve their spoons from yew or plug the leaks in mugs and jugs; their dads replace the handles on their scythes and sickles, or fashion willow tines to renew the teeth in forks and rakes; their wives and daughters make new clothes or darn the old. Every home is embering before its fires in concentrated silence, and getting ready for the coming year.

And in our house, my wife and I set to work on the reeds and withies I gathered in the autumn, making trays and baskets for anyone that asked and could provide us with a ham, let’s say, or a honey pot by way of exchange. Such evenings were our most tender and consoling, no matter that the spring was far away and all we had to eat was barley bannock bread and broth, every day a Friday with no meat. So here, in Mr. Quill’s attentive company, I hear those busy sounds again. So long as I do not look up across the scullery, I am lost in lost and happy times.

For a while, the encounters and discoveries of this morning are almost forgotten in the engrossments of our work. Our talk is soft and intimate. Mr. Quill has the grace to show an interest in my story. Here is my chance to say how, now that Cecily is dead, I am eager for a change. A change and an adventure. “And not one that involves a single day of shepherding,” I add. “Though making vellum is a pleasing craft.” He nods while I am speaking. He takes my meaning, I believe. His nodding gives me reason to suppose he will discuss the matter with his host. “And you, sir?” I ask Mr. Quill. “Are there adventures calling you?”

His story is a shorter one. He has never been in love. He has no wife to widow him, and both his parents are deceased. His eldest brother has their property: the family home, a warehouse and a riverboat for trade and carriage of anything from fish to cloth. But Mr. Quill is not a wealthy man, he says, “not in possessions, not in my body … as you see. This left side is wooden from the shoulder to the ribs. A sudden palsy. Something in the bones. When I was a child.”

“So not an accident?” I mean to ask him if he was struck by lightning or injured by a bucking horse, as I overheard him say to Master Jordan last afternoon.

“That was my schoolroom jest, my regular defense against …” he starts to say, but shakes his head. He evidently does not want to mention lightning again. “No matter, though. I have been raised to understand I am unfit to work out of doors and too great an encumbrance to be employed within. I cannot help my brother in his warehouse or his boat. What use am I? In such a clumsy state, I cannot even find myself a wife. I take my happiness from this …” He indicates the paints and sketches on his desk. “Step forward, Walter. See how my colors have ennobled all my marks.”

While I’ve been working vellum from the skin, Mr. Quill has turned his scratchy charts and drawings into something odd and beautiful. There is no lettering as yet. Just shapes and lines and coloring. I recognize their intrigue and their sorcery. I’ve seen equally compound patterns, no less ineffable than these, when I’ve peeled back bark on dying trees, or torn away the papering on birches. I’ve seen them sketched by lichens on a standing stone, or designed by mosses in a quag, or lurking on the underwing of butterflies. I’ve found these ordinary abstracts in the least expected places hereabouts: I have only to lift a stone, or turn some fallen timber in the wood, or reverse a leaf. The structures and the ornaments revealed are made purposeful simply by being found. But none of these compare for patterned vividness with Mr. Quill’s designs. His endeavors are tidier and more wildly colorful — they’re certainly more blue — than anything that nature can provide. They’re rewarding in themselves. They are more pleasing than a barleycorn. “This one,” he says, “is, here and now, my true account. It’s what you have before Edmund Jordan the Younger brings in his improvements—”

“King Edmund the Second!” I suggest.

“Yes, let the man be crowned as that.”

Can I identify the barley field, Mr. Quill wants to know. I look again, hoping for some clues, from the charcoal-dark lines, perhaps, or from where the paint has crusted heaviest, or where it’s thinned and tonsured on the bubbles of the paper. It is not until he turns his painting through two quarters that I think I recognize the twists and fall of the field, the low redundant parts where barley grows on hostile soil, the sweeping upper wings where cropping is the best, the darker shading of the baulks, the snaking signature of what must be our snaking stream.

“Exactly so,” says Mr. Quill, when I indicate my answer with a finger, lifting a smudge of paint as I do so. “And here I’ve plaited in your boundary line.”

Now I can see the boggy path and Turd and Turf, not yet identified as the Blossom Marsh. There’s our top end. And there’s our deep and tall and goodly wood. Our fortress walls of thorn and scrub. Our unbuilt church. Our commons and our cottages. Our onetime safe and kindly realm.

I look again but squintingly, and not at the particulars. I’ve never before had a true sense of how our estate is shaped, how stars might shine on us, or what those hawks and kestrels see. It has been too many years for memory since I last observed our land from any greater distance than our clover hill — that first day, in fact, twelve years ago, when I arrived with Master Kent and saw, far off, from the pale green of the higher downs, the true green bowl — no, valley’s not the word — of this isolated place nesting, hidden, in those blank spaces between far rivers, nameless and beyond. But otherwise I’ve put no shape to it. Now I know the village is a profile of a brawny-headed man — a bust, in fact. His neck and shoulders are our pasturelands. Our cattle and our goats are feeding there. The four great fields make up his face. His ear — our pond — is small enough to be a child’s. He almost has a nose, where I suppose that little clovered hillock is. The forests are his hair.